Vivo announced that it had opened its 500th exclusive store in India earlier this week, and plans on taking the total to 650 by the end of next year. These stores are spread across India and cover more than 280 cities in the region.

The vast number of offline stores cover major tier 1, 2, and 3 cities as well, as per a BusinessStandard report. According to Nipun Marya, Vivo India Director Brand Strategy, “We are pleased to achieve this milestone of 500 exclusive stores in India. We believe that the offline channel is preferred by customers, as they like to experience the product before making a purchase decision. With customer centricity at the center of all decisions, we, at Vivo India, strive to offer our customers unique retail experiences.”

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Furthermore, the Chinese tech giant added more than 150 stores in India during the ongoing calendar year, despite facing challenges caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The move from the company arrives as it strengthens its offline presence in the Indian subcontinent. Marya further added that, “The company plans to expand the network to over 650 exclusive stores by 2021, to offer an exclusively delightful retail experience to its customers.”

For those unaware, these Vivo exclusive stores offers customers a live experience of the smartphones and their features. In other words, people can experience gaming on these handsets, use virtual reality, and more in such stores. Vivo is a major player in the Indian market with a 28 percent total market share in the nation. This was backed by its strong offline retail channel, which the company plans on expanding even further.

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Honor is currently working on strengthening its offline layout and offline distribution channels after becoming independent from Huawei. The company is expanding the number of its physical retails stores and has already raised the number since September.

According to a TechSina report, Honor has already opened multiple new stores across its home country, China. The new retail stores are available in regions like Chengdu, Lanzhou, Wuhan, and Xiamen, and will soon also include other regions as well. Furthermore, it is also reported that the Chinese budget smartphone maker has even been working on two new Honor experience stores, which will open sometime in December 2020.

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One of the experience stores will be in Chengdu Vientiane City while the other will be in the Nanjing Gemdale Plaza. A third Honor experience store is also slated to open in January 2021 and will be in Taiyuan. This showcases the company’s accelerated focus on offline channels that began back in 2015, and as of the end of 2019, there are more than 2,300 offline Honor stores in China.

Back in July 2020, Zhao Ming, Honor President stated in an interview that the the company’s offline sales had surpassed its online sales for the first time in the previous six months. For those unaware, Huawei sold Honor to Zhixin New Information Technology Co. Ltd. in November. Now, it seems that Huawei’s ex-subsidiary might become its rival in the Chinese smartphone market, with its recent aggressive push towards offline sales.

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E-commerce and the process of buying products online or offline grown tremendously over the past couple of years. This has led many brands to focus more on own their websites or partner with major e-retail sites to sell online. Now, Bose is also following the same route as the company has issued a statement that it is closing down all of its retail stores in the US, Australia, Japan, and Europe.

The main reason for this as the company stated was due to the fact that most of its speakers, headphones and other audiophilic products were being bought online. This makes the point of physical stores rather obsolete and cumbersome. Notably, the first Bose physical retails store opened back in 1993 and has numerous locations in both shopping centers and malls across the globe.

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According to Bose, a total of 119 stores will be shut down over the course of the next few months. However, approximately 130 physical stores will still remain open in various other countries like China, United Arab Emirates, South Korea and a few Southeast Asian regions like India. The company is even offering “outplacement assistance and severance to employees” that will lose their jobs when such physical stores close.

Currently, Bose sells its entire lineup online through Amazon, Best Buy, Target, Apple Stores and various other third party retailers. This includes its signature noise cancelling headphones and its renowned home audio systems to even portable Bluetooth speakers. The company with its stores aimed to deliver a way for customers to experience its products without purchasing first, but the booming growth of e-commerce has since made it outdated.

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(Source)

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POCO F1 is one of the cheapest Snapdragon 845 smartphone that you can find in the market right now and starting tomorrow, the phone will be a lot easier to purchase for customers. POCO India has just announced that their flagship will be available to purchase across Mi Home stores in India starting tomorrow. Apart from the Mi Home stores, the POCO F1 is also going to be available via Xiaomi’s offline partner stores starting Wednesday, October 17.

This move was expected since the POCO F1 recently went on open sale via Mi.com as well as Flipkart.com. As the POCO F1 stocks have become relatively stable, it makes sense for the company to make the phone available to offline customers too, which still account for a major chunk of the Indian smartphone market.

Note that POCO F1 will be slightly costlier in offline stores. We don’t have an official figure yet but the slight increase in price is to offset the additional operational costs incurred in retail stores. The company has also not revealed whether all the variants and colors will be up for sale via its Mi Store. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow for more details.

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To recap, the POCO F1 comes with Snapdragon 845 and 8GB RAM with LiquidCool technology. The phone has one of the best price to specs ratio in the market which makes it a good purchase option during the Diwali festival season in India.

In related news, the Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart has already teased the POCO F2 model. You can read more about it from here.

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